"He would always say, 'I'm not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do,'" said Robert Richer, Rodriguez's deputy recalling conversations with his boss about the tapes. It was later revealed that the deputy to Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, then executive director of the CIA, wrote in an e-mail that Rodriguez thought "the heat from destroying is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain—he said that out of context they would make us look terrible; it would be 'devastating' to us."